The Left-Hand Path: Mentor

by T. S. Barnett

  He didn’t seem to understand that his hedonistic actions had far-reaching consequences. Or at least, he didn’t care. Elton had to assume that he was intelligent enough to understand that what he was doing was wrong. He’d been evading Chasers for decades, so he clearly wasn’t an idiot. But if he had someone working with him now, it wouldn’t be a lover at his age—at least, Elton hoped not—so he must have had an apprentice. And if Moore had an apprentice, it meant that Elton had to put a stop to him before he passed on his life-stealing tricks to the next generation.

  The police scanner didn’t provide him with anything more than reports of robberies, domestic violence, and drug busts—nothing unusual for a city of any size. Elton knew the signs to listen for, but he heard no indication that anything supernatural was involved in any of it. He clicked off the scanner and called the number he had been given for a police officer who could help. He had contact information for the Chaser assigned to this district, but he wanted to hold off on alerting him that Nathaniel Moore had been hiding out in his city. Elton had put years of work into studying and locating Moore; he wasn’t about to let anyone else get the credit for bringing him in.

  He heard a click. “This is Ramos,” the man’s voice on the other end said.

  “Hello; my name is Elton Willis. I was given your name by Robert Reid at the Magistrate’s office in Vancouver. I was told you could assist me?”

  “Ah, yeah, he mentioned you. What can I do for you, sir?”

  “I need to know if there are any suspicious reports. Anything magic, any unusual bodies—especially the bodies. I need to know as soon as possible.”

  “Should I put you in contact with our local Magistrate, sir?”

  “No,” Elton said immediately. “This is a private matter.”

  “A private matter that might cause bodies, hm?” The man sounded skeptical.

  “I should say a matter for the Vancouver Magistrate. I’m looking for someone who may be in the city. If I need help, I’ll ask for it, but I’m sure you understand our want for discretion.”

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything, sir.”

  “Thank you, Ramos.” Elton hung up the phone and dropped it onto the seat. He wasn’t precisely on assignment from his Magistrate, but it didn’t sound nearly as official to say that he was spending his hard-earned vacation time hunting down an old man.

  He couldn’t sense anything at all as he drove through the city, and even when he stopped the car and dug his kit out of his luggage, the seeking spells he cast surreptitiously in the back seat of the car gave him nothing in return. It must have been the quietest day for magic in all of Arizona history. Usually he at least had to sort through the usual buzz of everyday practical magic, but there was nothing. That in itself was concerning, but not likely something that Moore could organize even if he wanted to. It would make more sense to shield himself under the cover of a multitude of unimportant spells.

  Elton found a motel on the outskirts of the city and paid for a room so that he could at least patch up his head wound. He dragged his bag and a suitcase full of files into the room, dropping the heavy case with a thump. Moore hadn’t been active in so long that all of his files were still on paper, rather than digital. Elton had asked one of the aides at the Magistrate to upload them for him ages ago, but in the meantime, he was stuck with the paper copies.

  He sat on the bed with his laptop open beside him playing the audiobook version of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—he’d heard it before, but that didn’t matter. The noise helped him think. He held a damp cloth to the back of his head and pored through the folders yet again, looking for any hint as to where Moore might run. The documents hadn’t changed, but he looked anyway. Information was limited almost completely to hearsay and handwritten reports. By the time the Magistrate was taking anything like decent records, Moore was already close to retirement. All Elton had were mundane arrest reports, photos, a few statements from witnesses, transcripts of phone calls. Even the photos weren’t very helpful. Either they were blurry shots of Moore himself taken with cameras from decades ago, or they were crime scene photos that didn’t show anything but the charred tar marks on the floor where he had burned his victims’ bodies after draining them.

  Elton idly spun and clicked a pen in his hand as he turned page after page. The photos of Moore might have been entertaining if Elton hadn’t known he was an absolute psychopath. His latest recorded activities were in the early 70’s, so there were a few photos of him as a young man at rallies protesting the Vietnam War. It was odd, seeing photos of a twenty-something in bell-bottom jeans and a middle aged man in high-waist pants and a fedora, knowing they were the same man. There was even a stack of photos that were supposedly from the first-ever photo booth on Broadway in 1925. Moore had a woman under his arm and that familiar sneering smirk on his face.

  The first time Elton had heard of Nathaniel Moore, he was twenty-one years old and had just been inducted into the Chasers under the Vancouver Magistrate. Moore was already a legend then, almost a myth—a story that other Chasers told of The One That Got Away, as though every one of them had let him slip through their fingers personally. Some just made jokes about the Americans not keeping their people in line. No one had heard a peep from him for forty years, but the stories were too tempting for Elton to ignore. People like that didn’t just disappear.

  There hadn’t been many of Moore’s type of destructive witches—what the Magisters called olc túathaid—in modern times. Being a Chaser today mostly meant policing people’s personal relationships, which didn’t hold any particular allure for Elton. He had seen his share of actual troublemakers as well as the type who got drunk and thought it was a good idea to put on a magic show in Victory Square, but he had never felt challenged.

  Moore was Elton’s Zodiac Killer. He reveled in his crimes, and he had never truly been close to being caught. He was supposedly incredible to see—a witch in the way most witches could only hope to be. He had likely forgotten more spells than Elton would ever learn, and it was whispered that he could cast spells without a grounding and without speaking, but Moore had clearly been wearing a carved bracelet that suggested otherwise. Elton had even heard that he could fly, which he had the most trouble believing.

  Someone like that, someone who by all accounts was an amazing witch, uncatchable, unstoppable—how could Elton resist chasing him?

  He listened to his police scanner and waited for a phone call long into the night. He paced the room and made it through half a pack of chewing gum, periodically casting seeking spells until he fell asleep fully dressed on a pile of papers with reruns of The Andy Griffith Show playing in the background.

  His cell phone woke him with a start first thing in the morning, but he managed to clear his throat so that his voice didn’t sound so dry when he answered.

  “Mr. Willis?” Ramos’s voice brought Elton fully to attention. “We had a disturbance late last night that I think might be related to your case. There was a fight at Shady’s—that’s a bar over on East Indian School Road—but the witnesses said the attacker put the other guy on the ground without even touching him, and had been doing some kind of tricks before that, claiming to be able to do real magic. Sound like your guy?”

  “It definitely does,” Elton said. Moore had a history of trying to show mundanes the truth whether they wanted to know or not. Maybe he pitied them, or maybe he just couldn’t resist showing off.

  “I can give you the address if you want to talk to the bartender. He’s the one who called us. I had to tell the local Chaser, too, you understand.”

  “Of course. I’ll take the address, please.” Elton took down the street number the officer gave him and began to gather up his wallet and keys. “Thank you for calling me, Ramos. I’ll be in touch if I need anything else.”

  “Sure thing. Be careful out there.”

  Elton thanked him again and ended the call, leaving his files strewn across the bed and climbing straight into his rental car.
Moore hadn’t even left town—he was taunting him.

  The bar was closed so early in the morning, of course, so Elton turned his police scanner on and ate a salty, unhealthy fast-food breakfast that left him slightly sick. A car showed up at the bar before too long, but when Elton got out of the car to greet the owner, he stopped short at the sight of the silver ring on the other man’s finger.

  “You must be the one Ramos told me about,” the older man said, offering Elton his hand. “From Vancouver, was it? You’re well out of your district.”

  “That’s right. I don’t mean to impose on you, but this is a matter we’d rather handle quietly. Elton Willis.”

  “Phillip Martin,” the other man said as he shook Elton’s hand. He was easily in his forties, and the lines on his face were proof of his life in service to the Magistrate. He still stood straight, but his hands had become thin and his mouth seemed to be constantly turned into a stern line. “I hope your people haven’t let anyone dangerous loose here. Yuma is a quiet city.”

  “I expect I’ll be on my way before you know it, Mr. Martin. I believe I have the situation well in hand.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Phillip said dryly. Another car pulled in after a few moments, and the bartender let them into the closed bar while he began prepping for the evening. He told them exactly what Elton had expected. A man of Moore’s description came in with a younger Asian woman—probably the person who had hit Elton with a candlestick—and played darts for a while, had a couple of beers, then started telling fortunes at a table at the back. It seemed he got into a fight with an angry husband and sent the man to the hospital without ever laying a hand on him.

  “Did you get his name?” Phillip asked, but the bartender shook his head.

  “No. He paid cash. I asked Bill, the door man, but he said he couldn’t really remember either of them. Weirdest thing—Bill’s usually good about that.”

  Elton and Phillip shared a brief glance. It was common for mundanes tricked by illusions to have foggy memories of what they had actually seen. Phillip took some notes and thanked the bartender for his time, then tilted his head for Elton to follow him out of the bar.

  “Was that your man?” he asked, and Elton nodded. “Follow me back to my office. I’m sure it’s in both of our best interests to get this cleared up as quickly as possible.”

  Elton did as he was told, following the other man’s car through the city to the squat office building where the other Chaser worked. He followed Phillip down the drab hallway and through the flat brown door into the small office. It looked very much like Elton’s office at home—a simple desk, a filing cabinet, a phone, and a slightly aged computer. Elton at least had a photo of Jocelyn on his desk and a small houseplant, but Phillip’s office was quite stark. Boring, almost.

  As soon as he took a step inside, Phillip slid suddenly and fell to the floor in an undignified sprawl. Elton almost slipped himself, and the other man struggled on the slick floor for a few moments before accepting Elton’s help.

  “Whoever’s been in my damned office,” Phillip snapped, searching the room for any sign of the guilty party. He carefully stepped across the slippery floor and pushed a small stack of women’s magazines off the desk into the trash can. “I’ve been getting these for months. New ones all the time. I don’t know who keeps signing me up for them. Now the floor—” He paused to sniff once or twice. “Is it butter? Is that butter on my floor?”

  “It certainly smells like butter,” Elton agreed, maintaining a straight face with Herculean effort.

  Phillip sighed, attempting to regain his composure as he gestured to the chair opposite him. Elton took the seat offered to him while the other man settled behind the desk, but as soon as Phillip sat down, a deafening honk sounded in the room, almost sending him to the floor again as he skid on the buttery floor in an attempt to get out of the chair. With a harsh curse, he tore the small air horn from the bottom of his chair and threw it into the trash can harder than was really necessary, causing another short honk. He cleared his throat, straightened his shirt, and carefully took his seat again while Elton bit his tongue to keep from laughing.

  “Who is it you’re looking for, Mr. Willis?” he asked, making a solid effort to maintain his decorum as he booted the computer. “Has he been here long? I probably know him.”

  “It’s…a sensitive matter.” Elton wasn’t especially eager to tell this stranger that he was on the verge of catching someone like Nathaniel Moore. He had barely wanted to tell his own supervisor, but the man knew him well enough to know his private obsession.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what could be so sensitive that your Magistrate can’t share information with mine. This man is clearly dangerous. If he’s been hiding out in my city, I want to know who he is.”

  The phone on the desk rang before Elton could reply, and Phillip answered it with a clipped greeting. He spoke to the person on the line for a minute or two, then frowned across the desk at Elton and hung up.

  “I have other matters to attend to, Mr. Willis,” he said as he stood, clearly ending the visit. “I trust that you’ll keep me in mind during your…investigation, if I can be of any help.”

  “Of course.” Elton stood and shook the man’s hand again, exchanged cards with him, then showed himself out of the office building. He sat in his car and listened to the police scanner long enough to watch Phillip cross the parking lot, and then he drove back to the apartment where he’d been assaulted. He was willing to bet Moore wasn’t going to leave behind all of his supplies.

  5

  Cora was awake long before Nathan was. She hadn’t slept well. The reality of what she’d done had sunk in somewhere between Nathan stripping naked and climbing into the bed beside her—despite there being another perfectly good bed—and her mother finally texting her in the middle of the night to ask if she was ever going to bring home the yogurt bars she had asked for. No concern, no worry, not even curiosity as to where she was. Just yogurt bars. She knew she had never been the ideal daughter. Her parents had wanted to do something good, she guessed, or at least something that made them look good, by adopting a Chinese baby girl. They had money then. When she was little, her dad had lost his job, but her mother didn’t understand the concept of living within their means, so now they were deeply in debt. Since her mother was clearly too good for a job, all she had to do all day was gripe at Cora about how she looked.

  She had never been the delicate, petite, effortlessly beautiful Chinese girl her mother expected. She kept her hair above her shoulders, she’d had some acne when she was younger, and she had to run regularly to keep the extra weight off her thighs. She wore clothes she found at thrift shops to try to take some of the financial burden off her father, so they rarely fit her very well and they matched even less frequently. When she wasn’t at work, she was expected to clean the house, cook dinner, and run errands for her mother with money they didn’t have, while her older sister went away to college in Colorado. There was never any discussion of college for Cora. She had done pretty well in school—she probably could have gotten a scholarship if she’d wanted. She had wanted to go in a vague sense, but her family counted on the money she brought in, and they made her feel guilty enough about the prospect of going away that she hadn’t considered it for very long. Besides, there wasn’t anything she felt passionate enough about. None of it mattered now anyway. She deleted the notice of a missed call from her job with a faint sense of satisfaction.

  She looked over at Nathan, sleeping soundly on the bed next to her with the scratchy hotel blanket tangled around his waist, and she felt glad that she had decided to come with him. With him helping her, she could be more than she was. More than her family would have let her be. She could be the kind of person who drove too fast in the middle of the night and ran red lights with the radio blaring Walk This Way. The kind of person who made her wait in the car while he went shopping and broke into a random office building, then refused to tell her why. She could also be the
kind of person who never worried and knew how to protect herself, and she figured that outweighed the traffic violations.

  She tilted her head to inspect the blue stone pendant around his neck. She’d never seen it before, but Nathan hadn’t taken it off since they left the apartment, and he frequently had a hand on it as though he was afraid to lose it. It was pretty, but she felt hesitant to touch it—even if doing so hadn’t meant putting her hand very near Nathan’s naked chest. The last thing she needed was him waking up with her leaned over him touching his chest and him getting the wrong idea. If nothing else, the teasing would never end.

  When she couldn’t take the silence anymore, she turned on the television and watched Sesame Street on the only channel that would come through. When that didn’t wake Nathan up, she had a shower and brushed her teeth. When that didn’t wake him up, she slammed the bathroom door and turned the volume up until people two rooms over must have been able to hear the theme song to Elmo’s World.

  Nathan finally sat up in the bed and glared blearily across at her until she turned the volume down to a reasonable level. He got out of bed with no concern for his nakedness, causing Cora to keep her back to him as he crossed the room, and he washed his face in the sink and shook the water from his hands.

  “How late were you going to sleep in?” she asked him without turning around. “Aren’t you worried about the Chaser that’s after you-slash-us? What’s our plan, here?”

  “Relax,” Nathan chuckled, and he went into the bathroom and lifted the toilet seat without shutting the door. Cora covered her ears to block out the sound and called him horrible, but he only flushed the toilet and turned on the shower. He frowned over his shoulder at her when he put his hand into the stream. “You’ve used up all the hot water, you monster.”

  “Cold showers are good for your skin,” she quipped.

  He paused. “Is that true?”

  She sighed at him. “About that plan?”